The laying bare of the real nature of American operations makes the political and media establishment anxious.
19 February 2011 [print_link]
The ongoing tumultuous events in the Middle East and North Africa have further exposed the claim that the US government has an interest in democracy anywhere in the world. Outraged populations have risen up against one brutal regime after another that has been armed, financed and maintained by Washington—Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and beyond.
The goal of American foreign policy, more clearly revealed than ever, is to defend the wealth and strategic interests of the US corporate-financial oligarchy.
This has not been lost on great numbers of people, in the US and elsewhere. The laying bare of the real nature of American operations makes the political and media establishment anxious. For various historical reasons, US imperialism has previously dressed up its predatory operations in the guise of bringing “freedom and democracy” to various peoples. As Trotsky remarked derisively in 1924, “America is always liberating somebody, that’s her profession.” (After all, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and “Operation Enduring Freedom” are the official names used by the US governments for its occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively.)
Only someone not right in the head, however, could pretend that supporting dictators like a Ben Ali (Tunisia), a Mubarak (Egypt), or a Saleh (Yemen) is a liberating act. These figures have presided for decades over regimes that routinely arrest, sadistically abuse and murder political opponents, suppress workers in the interest of foreign and domestic corporations, and generally terrorize their populations, while engorging themselves, their families and cronies with riches.
The editors of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal have therefore felt it necessary to come to the defense of the dictatorships propped up by Washington. In an editorial February 16 (“Egypt and Iran”), the Journal uses the occasion of police repression by the Iranian regime to make the case for US-backed dictators.
This is a grotesque lie. The Journal chooses to forget that Mubarak and Egypt’s military lived by and through violence, with the full backing of “the West,” for three decades. Far from pressuring the Egyptian government to “shun violence,” Washington enlisted Egyptian officials to torture US-held prisoners as part of Washington’s rendition program in the “war on terror.”
We will spare the reader descriptions of the barbaric methods of torture employed by the Egyptian state against its real and imagined enemies. Its prisons, by all accounts, rang with screams. The regime killed thousands and imprisoned tens of thousands, at a conservative estimate.
In the last days of Mubarak’s rule alone, the military “secretly detained hundreds and possibly thousands of suspected government opponents … and at least some of these detainees have been tortured,” according to human rights activists cited by the Guardian on February 9.
Nonetheless, the Journal continues shamelessly, “To put it another way, pro-American dictatorships have more moral scruples.”
The implicit claim that the Egyptian army is refraining from a crackdown on popular protests and strikes due to its “moral scruples” is absurd. If it has so far abstained from drowning popular resistance in blood, it is because it faces a millions-strong mass movement and dares not pursue such a policy.
The generals in Cairo and their overlords in Washington fear that, with such an assault, they might provoke a revolutionary response. The military is therefore biding its time, preparing its forces, hoping that official and petty-bourgeois “opposition” forces will demobilize popular protests and allow them to re-establish control of the situation.
The timing of the Journal’s article was unfortunate, however. Within 24 hours of the editorial’s appearance, one of those “scrupulous,” pro-American dictatorships in Bahrain, an island nation whose people lives in the shadow of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, launched a lethal assault on protesters gathered in the capital city’s central square.
Officially, five were killed, although 60 are missing, and some 250 people injured, by batons, rubber bullets and pellets fired from shotguns. The security forces attacked sleeping men, women and children without mercy, beating some of them to death. The savagery of the attack outraged the population, prompting huge funeral processions on Friday. Again, crowds were fired on and many wounded, by the American-trained army this time.
Bahrain is considered critical by the US for a number of geopolitical reasons, and it appears that even the crocodile tears shed by Barack Obama over repression in Egypt will not be spilled in this case. As one commentator noted, “As far as Washington is concerned, this small Persian Gulf kingdom may be where support for Middle East democracy dies.”
In any event, the US government over the decades has cooperated with and backed the most horrific regimes on earth, from Franco’s Spain and apartheid South Africa, and governments run by butchers in military uniform in Central and South America, to semi-feudal monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and the rule of mass murderers in Indonesia. American foreign policy has, in fact, sailed upon an ocean of blood and human misery.
The Journal editorial’s hostile comments about the Iranian regime are not driven by any affection for democracy. The editors are sympathetic to Iran’s Green Movement because the latter is a right-wing trend, with strongest support in middle class layers, which criticizes the Ahmadinejad government for not going far enough along the lines of International Monetary Fund-inspired “free market reforms.” A Mousavi-Karroubi regime in Iran would still be a dictatorship, but it would be precisely a “pro-American” dictatorship.
If, however, one were to set aside the Journal’s self-serving claims about Iran, what is one to make of the fact that a leading American publication openly makes the case for supporting dictatorship?
In this the Journal speaks, although perhaps more brazenly and openly than some, for the American ruling elite as a whole. The editors of the New York Times would not disagree, although they might approach the matter somewhat more gingerly … and underhandedly. The Obama administration proceeds in a similar fashion, cynically registering its “alarm” and “deep concern” about each successive atrocity carried out by its dictatorial client states.
The chatter of the Journal’s editors about “moral scruples” is just that. The Wall Street Journal appraises a given foreign government according to the most cynical Realpolitik: does it assist or stand in the way of American global interests? After the fact, the newspaper finds virtues and “moral scruples” in those governments that do—or rather, their supposed virtue lies precisely in their subservience to US strategic aims.
By Bill Moyers
Posted on February 15, 2011
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Crossposted with http://www.alternet.org/story/149925/
History Makers is an organization of broadcasters and producers from around the world concerned with the challenges and opportunities faced by factual broadcasting. Bill Moyers was the keynote speaker at the 2011 convention on January 27, 2011, in New York City.
I talked about this gathering when I was in California this past weekend and spent time with a good friend and supporter of my own work on television, Paul Orfalea. He’s the maverick entrepreneur who founded Kinko’s in a former hamburger stand with one small rented Xerox copier and turned it into a business service empire with more than two billion dollars a year in revenue. After selling Kinko’s, Paul became one of the most popular, if unorthodox, teachers of undergraduates at the University of California/ Santa Barbara. When I told him what I would be doing today he applauded and understood immediately the importance of what you do. He described to me how he teaches history “backwards” to college students who have learned little about the past in high school, don’t know that the past is even alive, much less that it lives in them and question its value today. He hands his students a contemporary story from some daily news source, tells them to begin with the “now” of it and to then walk the trail back down the chronology to trace the personalities, circumstances and choices that made it today’s news. Their assignment, in effect, is to begin at the entrance to the cave and rewind Ariadne’s thread in the opposite direction, back to the deep origins of the story. In an era marked by the lack of continuity and community between the generations, this strikes me as an inspired way to stretch young imaginations across the time zones of human experience.
I also had the privilege of witnessing Fred in action. When he was president of “CBS News” and I was the White House press secretary, he would come down from New York on the shuttle and slip in the back door of the White House and along the hall past the Cabinet Room to the private entrance to my office for an hour-or-so chat. I had done some preliminary work at the Office of Education on the future of public television in 1964, and we were soon talking about the medium’s future; he was a true believer in television “that dignifies instead of debases” and of the importance “of at least one channel free of commercials and commercial values.” Little did we know at the time that he would soon quit the job he relished as president of the news division that he and Edward R. Murrow had built. The two of them created “See It Now” and “CBS Reports,” which set the standard for investigative reporting and documentaries of unprecedented power and impact. One of their collaborations was the famous documentary on the demagogic and dangerous Senator Joseph McCarthy. They made the brilliant decision to let McCarthy speak for himself, an entire broadcast’s worth of his bullying words and techniques. McCarthy obligingly hanged himself on national television, far more effectively and fatally than anyone else’s words could. His own words had turned Americans against his demagoguery – something for which the right to this day has never forgiven what they denounced as the “Communist Broadcasting System.” Watching that documentary over and again, I realized that it is through such unhurried honoring of reality that we can approach the myriad and messy truths of human experience. For lasting effect, those truths cannot be forced into the mind of the public; they must be nurtured.
Maybe not. As Joe Keohane reported last year in The Boston Globe, political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency “deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information.” He was reporting on research at the University of Michigan, which found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in new stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts were not curing misinformation. “Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.” You can read the entire article online.
Robert Parry has written, “the truthers” threw out all the evidence of al-Qaeda’s involvement, from contemporaneous calls from hijack victims on the planes to confessions from al-Qaeda leaders both in and out of captivity that they had indeed done it. Then, recycling some of the right’s sophistry techniques, such as using long lists of supposed evidence to overcome the lack of any real evidence, the “truthers” cherry-picked a few supposed “anomalies” to build an “inside-job” story line. Fortunately, this Big Lie never took hold in the public mind. These truthers on the left, if that is where GPS can find them on the political map, are outgunned, outmatched and outshouted by the media apparatus on the right that pounds the public like drone missiles loaded with conspiracy theories and disinformation and accompanied by armadas of outright lies.
George Orwell had warned six decades ago that the corrosion of language goes hand in hand with the corruption of democracy. If he were around today, he would remind us that “like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket,” this kind of propaganda engenders a “protective stupidity” almost impossible for facts to penetrate.
Against these tendencies it is an uphill fight to stay the course of factual broadcasting. We have to keep reassuring ourselves and one another that it matters and we have to join forces to defend and safeguard our independence. I learned this early on.
When I collaborated with the producer Sherry Jones on the very first documentary ever about the purchase of government favors by political action committees, we unfurled across the Capitol grounds yard after yard of computer printouts listing campaign contributions to every member of Congress. The broadcast infuriated just about everyone, including old friends of mine who a few years earlier had been allies when I worked at the White House. Congressmen friendly to public television were also outraged, but, I am pleased to report, PBS took the heat without melting.
There are other uses of the disclosures from WikiLeaks admirably compiled by Greg Mitchell in the current edition of The Nation, where the one-time editor of Editor and Publisher performed an important public service by culling the gold from the dust.
Yes! magazine just two days ago:
The rules that the FCC passed in December are vague and weak. The limited protections that were placed on wired connections, the kind you access through your home computer, leave the door open for the phone and cable companies to develop fast and slow lanes on the Web and to favor their own content or applications.
The Internet fight for democracy is a public fight. Come on in!
Bill Moyers is the host of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.
© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
